In my recently published collection of essays on old Shanghai, Destination Shanghai (Blacksmith Books, 2018), I mention the Zeitgeist Bookstore, a small left-wing establishment run by the German communist Irene Weitermeyer in the late 1920s. It was on the North Soochow Road (now Suzhou Bei Lu). Lu Xun was a regular visitor, as was Agnes Smedley, as well as the Cominetern agents Richard Sorge & Hotsumi Ozaki. I’m convinced Roger Hollis was recruited there by the Soviets in the late 1920s and later became Britain’s “Fifth Man”. You’ll have to read the essay ‘Red Sojourners at the Zeitgeist Bookstore’ for the whole argument.
Anyway, Lu Xun, himself of course a man of generally left wing opinions, also spoke German and enjoyed the conversation there. He recalled in his memoirs being introduced, in 1932, by Agnes Smedley, and Ursula Hamburger (another Comintern spy in Shanghai), to the woodcuts by the Berlin artist Kathe Kollwitz. Kollwitz was a friend of Smedley’s from her Berlin sojourn between 1921 and 1928. However, I think either the exhibition was a year earlier, or Lu Xun already knew Kollwitz’s woodcuts.
This woodcut from Kollewitz appeared in Beidou (Big Dipper)
The fascinating new collection of various pieces of journalism by Lu Xun, Jottings Under Lamplight (edited by Eileen J Cheng & Kirk A Denton – Harvard University Press) shows his thinking when he selected a Kollwitz woodcut – The Sacrifice (1923) – to commemorate his friend Rou Shi (who had been devoted to his mother), a left wing writer executed by the KMT for his communist beliefs in 1931. Lu Xun was an admirer of Kollwitz’s and German expressionism; Rou Shi apparently introduced him to woodcuts in general as an art form.
The image appeared in the inaugural issue of Beidou (Big Dipper)
[1] Elizabeth Emrich, Modernity Through Experimentation: Lu Xun
and the Modern Chinese Woodcut Movement, (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
The Baur Foundation in Geneva has a sufficiently ample and representative collection of Asian textiles to provide a comparison with the Western fashions of this period. The remarkable encounter of the two has given rise to an exhibition and catalogue in which designs by Parisian creators are displayed alongside pieces of contemporary Far Eastern textiles. The accompanying book makes it possible also to publish the donations of Japanese kimonos and other clothes received by the Baur Foundation – including the Sato Mariko (2008) and Sugawara Keiko (2015) donations – but also certain Chinese textiles that add to the richness of the institution’s collections. And there’s a book….
When? 10 April 2019 – 7 July 2019, Tuesday to Sunday 2 pm to 6 pm
Where? Baur Foundation, Museum of Far Eastern Art, 8 rue Munier-Romilly 1206 Geneva – Switzerland
Admission fees: adults: CHF 15.- , students, seniors and
unemployed: CHF 10.-, Free of charge: AMS/VMS, ICOM, Press, children
under 16, Groups above 10: CHF 10.-
A quick visit to the Teatro Apollo on Macao’s Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro, just off the Leal Senado. Completed in 1935 and opened with the English language motion picture “The Merry Widowâ€. The cinema could seat over a thousand paying customers and the complex always included some ground level retail and adjacent apartments, which must have been a great address. In the 1940s and 50s the cinema also hosted some stage shows and began to show more Cantonese films.
Sadly there’s nothing much to see now except the exterior. The once grand lobby is a clothes shop with false lowered ceilings – who knows what’s behind the paint and plaster. The old auditorium is now used as a warehouse and is inaccessible.
There is a tale, told by Ian Fleming in his 1963 book Thrilling Cities, that (in the early 1960s) there were no seagulls in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour due to the remaining number of sampans picking all the trash out of the water. Fleming says that he was told that this was also the case in Shanghai on the Huangpu River until 1949 when sampan families were largely forced to come ashore and settle. Seagulls then appeared in Shanghai where none had been seen for generations. Good story and told since at least the 1930s – but is it true?
I can’t find any photographs of seagulls in Shanghai before 1949, though Shi Zhecun, the inter-war modernist writer in Shanghai did pen a short story entitled Seagulls in 1932. He is imagining seagulls, but obviously knows what they are! However the story is not set in Shanghai but a seaside village just outside the city.
A few years ago Anne Witchard at University of Westminster told me that she had read an article on the BBC website that the people who do the Blue Plaques thought there were not enough in the UK to black and Asian people. Indeed, there are only two (to our knowledge) to Chinese people – the one to Dr Sun Yat-sen in Cottered, Hertfordshire, and one to Lao She in Bayswater. So we contacted the Oxford Blue Plaques Committee and suggested Chiang Yee – and now he’s getting one…as Anne Witchard has organised a symposium on the same day…
‘The Silent Traveller: Chiang Yee in Britain 1933-55’
Saturday 29th June 2019
Time: 10.00 am – 16.00 pm
Headley Lecture Theatre, Ashmolean Museum
Open to the public and free of charge but booking
essential
You
are cordially invited to
attend a symposium at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, to celebrate the awarding
of a Blue Plaque to Chinese artist Chiang Yee (1903-1977) author of the Silent Traveller series, much loved for
its Chinese perspective on Britain’s landscapes and people.
Chiang Yee lived for fifteen years in
Southmoor Road, Oxford, after his London home was destroyed in the Blitz. We will be joined by Chiang Yee’s biographer Da Zheng, author of The Silent Traveller from the East, Paul French author of Midnight in Peking, acclaimed historian
Frances Wood, and other China experts to discussthe surprisingly eventful life behind the modest persona of the
self-styled Silent Traveller.
Regular readers will know I am a great lover of famous
men (and it is all men so far I’m afraid but submissions are open from all
periods and genders) making comparisons between China and other places
(invariably provincial England). Here is a round up of the best so far:
The usually erudite and brilliant W Somerset Maugham wrote ‘…the bamboo, the Chinese bamboo, transformed by some magic of the mist, look just like the hops of a Kentish field’;
The American comedian Will Rogers compared the countryside around Harbin to Nebraska when he visited in the early 1930s;
In the 1870s Jules Verne compared Hong Kong to a town in Kent or Surrey;
In 1933 Peter Fleming toured China and compared Chengde to Windsor;
He then compared Peking with Oxford for some reason! – gotta love the Flemster!!;
Later in 1938 Auden and Isherwood described the countryside around Canton as reminiscent of the Severn Valley;
And then during his stay in China during the Second World War the (yet to be at the time) famous Sinologist Joseph Needham compared Fuzhou to Clapham and, perhaps most bizarrely, wartime Chongqing to the charming Devon seaside resort of Torquay!
Noel Coward’s excellent comparison of 1921 Shanghai as ‘a cross between Brussels and Huddersfield’
EM Forster’s science fiction short story from 1909 called The Machine Stops where he writes, ‘What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking?’
And now we can add the great French explorer of the Mekong, Francis Garnier, who, in 1870, noted that the city of Kunming evoked the countryside around Rome….he may have been on to something…
Macao’s 3-story General Post Office at the junction of Senado Square and Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro was completed in 1929. Worth a ‘then and now’ picture i think….
